With the advent of virtualization and cloud infrastructures, platforms, and software as service deployment, licensed applications and services that were traditionally hardware based, such as firewalls, load balancers, wide area network optimizers, etc., are being deployed as virtual machines (VMs). Network function virtualization will offer savings in cost by allowing the use of common-off-the-shelf hardware in a cloud infrastructure and speed innovation because it is easier to introduce new features into the software without having to wait for a new hardware release cycle. Currently available licensing solutions are proprietary, not designed for the cloud, and are not rooted in hardware, which provides greater security.